With homelessness becoming ever more apparent on the streets of Honolulu, are all possible places being used that could house these individuals and families?

Always Investigating uncovered the details and found some significant changes in direction when it comes to low-income housing.

We took a look at every state-owned and Honolulu-County-owned low-income unit to see what’s not being used, and discovered along the way some big shifts in how government plans to deal with its inventory.

The homeless problem may be most visible in places like Kakaako’s tent city, which seems to expand by the day. It’s hard to see from that just how many people the public housing system is taking in.

“In the homeless population in the last couple of years, we housed a little over 4,000 individuals,” said Hakim Ouansafi, executive director of the state Hawaii Public Housing Authority. “That includes families with children as well as single members.”

Despite the thousands they have helped, the number of homeless on the street is still the thousands and growing.

“Getting the units compared to the demand,” Ouansafi said, “is just overwhelming.”

It’s an overwhelming churn of a housing crisis that no one can seem to solve.

But are all units possible being lived in? Always Investigating scoured each and every state and Honolulu County public housing unit’s status to find out how many are empty and why.

Within the state’s inventory of about 6,000: 239 are completely offline for major construction, another 175 are vacant for minor repairs. That’s actually way down from the 875 units empty as of a few years ago when the current housing director took the job.

Always Investigating asked, “For years vacancy was a chronic issue, broken-down units, what are you doing to change that?”

“I was told it was going to be bad, but I found out it was worse than bad,” Ouansafi said. “There were units that were vacant for 10 to 12 years, so we were able to immediately attack that.”

With more staff, contractors and money, what used to take three and a half years to reconstruct now can take as little as six months, even for major rebuilding like what’s happening in Palolo Valley.

Elsewhere, vacancies between tenants in ready-to-go units can flip in a few as seven days. That used to be 260 days.

The state wait list is 11,000 names long.

“Three years ago we had 25,000 people on the wait list,” Ouansafi said. “Now that we’re running only two-percent vacancy based on available units, it will probably take us around seven to eight years to be able to serve everybody else.”

That could come way down soon as places like Mayor Wright or School Street about quadruple in size with redevelopment, adding a net 2,000 units within about five years. Plus, Ouansafi envisions another 8,000 state units along the rail line.

“It will take an aggressive increase of inventory,” Ouansafi said, “not just us for federal housing, but affordable housing in general, private developers and others.”

Others including the city, where out of about 1,200 units they’ve got a whole 29-unit site down for reconstruction at Winston Hale another six to nine months from done, another set of units in conversion at Pauahi Hale as it transitions to Mental Health Kokua’s management, and another 22 vacant units across various other city sites.

Always Investigating discovered a major shift in priorities in the city amid the housing crisis. We have learned the city will be hanging on to its county-owned buildings after a deal to sell them all fell apart last year and was originally heading for a rebid.

We asked: A year ago, the city was going to get out of the affordable housing business in terms of the units. That deal (with buyer Honolulu Affordable Housing Partners LLC) didn’t go through, what’s the status of it now? Does the city still intend to sell its collection of affordable units at this point?

“Currently, we are not making that a priority to sell those units at this time,” said Sandy Pfund of the mayor’s Strategic Development Office.

That’s because the city’s biggest push right now is on adding capacity in what officials call a “scattered site approach,” or deploying units quickly in many places, like converted shipping container homes on Sand Island by this fall.

“We are looking at putting pockets of affordable housing in various areas of need,” Pfund said, “and not to impact unduly any one particular neighborhood.”

The city has $32 million this year and $32 million next year to spend on capital projects targeted toward alleviating homelessness, including offers officials say they’re about to make for things like small apartment buildings.

“Acquiring small walk-up buildings, maybe 15-30-unit buildings,” Pfund explained. “Even walk-ups are not going to be cheap. Their minimum, we’ll be lucky if we can get $200,000 a unit.”

The city has already bought the Family Justice Center which the Prosecutor’s Office will manage as a domestic abuse temporary shelter. There’s Halewaiolu, 151 units of new senior housing coming to Chinatown, and the city is looking toward Aiea to do something similar.

Then there are thousands more envisioned along the rail route under what’s called “transit oriented development.” An estimated 52,000 units of all prices will pop up along rail and “we’d like to see 20 to 30 percent of those be affordable units,” said Harrison Rue, transit-oriented development administrator for the city.

When asked how that can be controlled, he explained, “We do have a draft proposal that will be going to council sometime soon in the next couple months to include an inclusionary housing percentage requirement.”

Much will be on the private market. Some of that will be public-private partnerships on city-owned land to keep market costs low, and others will be state-city developed to create the biggest jump in publicly owned housing numbers in generations.

“Our asset folks are looking at any city land where it’s possible to make a deal happen by contributing city land,” Rue said. “We’re working with the state to look at areas where there is state land to actually build more affordable housing.”

“Within the next five years, we will either start construction or complete or do an RFQ (request for quotation) of a total of 10,000 units,” Ouansafi said, with most of those coming along the rail line.

Beyond county and state housing, privately owned units whether rentals of rooms and cottages or apartments, serve 6,000 people with Section 8 vouchers, but even those holding the full-payment rent coupons run into unwilling landlords.

“These are folks that we guarantee payment with federal money. We pay on time, but they’re having an extremely hard time finding somebody who will accept them,” Ouansafi said. “We have 200 people on the street with Section 8 vouchers but they cannot find housing. I think the mentality of our community has to change, not in my house, not in my backyard.”

But it may be backyards across Oahu that could most quickly solve the problem.

These are units the city could soon legalize that would allow homeowners to build on their own spare space to rent. The accessory dwelling unit bill, Bill 20, will be up for hearing in the Honolulu City Council zoning committee on Thursday, July 23.

“It allows anybody to do this. The person who lives there, (who) owns the building, is the one who is renting it, so it is well-maintained, well-managed,” Rue said, “and it helps the owner provide some income on their mortgage.”

The ADU movement could turn an estimate 105,000 qualifying households into backyard- or second-story-addition landlords, helping one by one to make a bigger dent against homelessness that strikes people from all walks of life.

“This is a true story. A 14-year-old saying this is the first time they had an actual roof over their head, and they’re 14 years old. It’s heartbreaking,” Ouansafi said. “The basic human necessity is to have a roof over your head and until we achieve that, we have failed as a community, all of us combined.”

The rail project is getting into more congested residential and business areas, but to get the train going, some property owners will have to sell.

That’s getting more and more expensive and complicated.

A federal watchdog is expressing concern about the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation (HART) being behind schedule on land buys. Well over 100 deals with private and government entities still have to be made. Always Investigating dug into where and why it’s getting bogged down, and what it could cost taxpayers.

Bulldozers tore down property this week a stone’s throw from Ala Moana Center, the end of the line for Honolulu rail. It won’t reach here for years but the tear-down of HART-bought buildings is a reminder it’s coming.

Urban Honolulu hasn’t had to make way for a transportation project in decades and never to this scale.

“Not since when the freeway went through Makiki and Moilili,” said Mark Murakami, a land-use attorney with the law firm Damon Key Leong Kupchak Hastert. “The most recent government project was H-3, and that was all on state land.”

The way-out-west part of the rail right-of-way seems easy now, where rail’s path went through fields, compared to the maze of public, private and business interests on the rest of the route.

“This project is definitely going into a very congested area with definite impacts,” Murakami said, “and I’m not sure all the property owners along the way have truly recognized what those impacts are going to be.”

At least 38 once privately-owned homes and businesses have felt the impact (36 identified by HART at a May 2015 board presentation, plus another two more parcels disclosed to KHON2 as of the broadcast of this story). Buying those places set taxpayers back more than $71 million for the properties and another $7.5 million in relocation costs.

Always Investigating scoured the list of more than 230 properties originally identified as being in rail’s path, and so far HART only controls 83 of them. Another are going through condemnation, a forced taking in court.

“(It’s an) inevitability. Sure, the city and HART have the power to take your land away from you,” Murakami said. “The law, however, requires you be compensated for that, and the devil is in the details — what your land is worth, what the impact to the remainder is worth.”

Those details are throwing both sides for a loop. A consultant charged with being the federal government’s eyes and ears on the project keeps warning that HART is behind schedule on buying up the right of way.

“The number of outstanding parcels remains significant,” Jacobs Engineering Group wrote in its latest monthly project management oversight contractor (PMOC) report to the Federal Transit Administration. “Acquisitions are improving, but are still behind schedule.”

Even where the city doesn’t need to buy land, Jacobs Engineering warns that “easement locations for relocated utilities are becoming critical and could impact construction work.”

“It does seem like the right-of-way acquisitions are slowing down,” Murakami said. “There are timelines, there are appraisals, there are reviews. It’s an orderly process, but I think the schedule is largely driven by the construction timeline.”

Looking at Kakaako alone, HART still needs to buy a couple whole lots, but needs dozens of slivers or more, and dozens of temporary or permanent easements. That’s not getting any easier or any cheaper in the hot real estate market there.

HART said in a presentation to its board of directors that the area’s market conditions, and the likelihood of having to probably buy up a lot more full instead of partial lots, could send the price tag for right of way soaring. The budget right now is $222 million for the whole line.

Bumping up against land-buy delays, the federal government allowed HART to invoke what’s called an “irrevocable right of entry” on land it’s eyeing but doesn’t have yet, so it can get onsite before purchase or condemnation and get going with construction.

“Completed acquisitions are not required for construction to move forward as scheduled,” HART said in a statement to KHON2. “An important factor for us is that we have access to properties that we need to keep the project on schedule. Currently, we have access to more than 90 percent of the properties that we need through various agreements and we are on track with our construction schedule.”

But some surprises could be in store closer to town.

“It’s a dynamic process,” Murakami said. “There are very unique physical aspects of land in the town area with underground streams and utility tunnels we don’t know about. Even if the landowners aren’t currently slated for acquisition, it could definitely change as construction proceeds through this area.”

Click through our interactive map below to explore HART’s closed and pending/uncontrolled properties. (Note: Map does not include properties that have no street address.)

Oahu Community Correctional Center escapee Isaiah Kaisa and Women’s Community Correctional Center escapee Cheryl Nihoa have been charged with escape in the second degree. This is a class C felony punishable by up to five years in prison.

Kaisa was given a work furlough pass on April 4, 2015 and failed to return to OCCC the following day. He turned himself in on April 6. At the time of his escape, Kaisa was concurrently serving 10- and five-year terms of imprisonment. His prior convictions included ownership or possession of a prohibited weapon, unauthorized entry into a motor vehicle, forgery, and identity theft.

Nihoa has been serving a five-year prison term for a 2012 assault in the second degree. She was given a furlough pass from WCCC on April 7, 2015 and was scheduled to return that evening. She failed to return and was located at an acquaintance’s apartment on May 20, 2015, and arrested. Nihoa has prior convictions for promoting a dangerous drug in the third degree and prohibited acts related to drug paraphernalia.

“Escape from a work furlough program or any other type of furlough release shows a lack of respect for our criminal justice system and a disregard for the second chance that such programs provide,” Chin said. “The Department of the Attorney General will aggressively prosecute anyone who escapes from prison, including those who do so by violating such furloughs.”

Always Investigating reported back in May that inmate escapes have nearly tripled in Hawaii over the past few years, and found that due to breakdowns in the system, dozens of escapees did not have the often-promised escape charges tacked on to their records and sentences.

A long-awaited high school stadium on Maui finally has the green light.

Lahainaluna High School is gearing up for practice and planning a blessing, ready to have its first preseason football game at home.

The 10-year, $9 million stadium project paid for by donors, not taxpayers, received the okay to play Thursday, seemingly placed on the fast track since Always Investigating’s initial reports.

Actual construction has been complete for about a year, but hurdles kept popping up that pushed its opening day off, all the way past last year’s sports seasons and graduation.

After a slew of inspections, Maui County signed off on the certificate of occupancy this week.

The DOE could have made the school wait another couple weeks until its July 15 walkthrough, when a team would inspect and officially accept the facility.

But on Thursday, the school and its foundation got a pleasant surprise.

“We have gotten clearance from them that we are able to use the stadium from today on,” said Lahainaluna High School principal Emily De Costa. “We are excited because now we can have our preseason August game here. Sitting in the stands and having our fantastic view in front of us, it’s going to be an exciting day for every one of us.”

Besides the DOE saving about $15 million compared to what it would have likely cost to build the same project in the state system, the school itself will save thousands.

During football season alone, for example, every home game used to have to be played offsite in Wailuku or Upcountry Maui. Now, with home games actually at home, the school will save more than $7,000 in bus fees and many hours of travel time.

The principal says school leadership will meet to decide where to spend that saved bus money, most likely on computers.

If you’re on Maui, pencil in Aug. 8 for that first game in the new home field.

Hawaii’s oldest high school is another step closer to being able to use its new stadium. It’s been a decade-long process that’s finally nearing the end.

KHON2 went to Maui last month to check out what was going on with the stadium at Lahainaluna High School, a project years in the making that seemed to face a delay hurdle around every turn. Now, they’ve got the finish line in sight.

The project is remarkable not just because of how long it’s taken, but because it’s privately funded and built. Most of the $9 million came from a visitor to Maui, Sue D. Cooley, who took the school under her wing.

This week, the stadium received its last-needed certificate of occupancy, which means the county building department says it’s all done. The last county office to sign off was wastewater for the press box, which ironically has no pipes or plumbing.

The stadium foundation’s last step is to get the state Department of Education to accept the gifted buildings.

“I am not going to be completely as celebratory until we do get the final acceptance, even though it’s some major hurdles we got over. Until we turn over the facility, I won’t be able to really enjoy the moment. It’s coming soon,” said Jeff Rogers of the Lahainaluna High School Foundation.

The foundation is working on sending all the finished paperwork to the DOE. The DOE says once the paperwork is received, it can send out a team to inspect the project and finalize with a letter of acceptance.

The foundation says if the DOE can give at least a conditional acceptance right after its visit, preseason events can get underway and the students could play the season’s first football game there on Aug. 8.

Who is spending your money on shoes? What department spends the most on towing cars? How much rail money is being spent on travel?

Always Investigating found answers to these questions and more looking through Honolulu County’s spending on pCards, or government credit cards, that made the news after Big Island Mayor Billy Kenoi admitted misuse.

Since then, investigations found possible misuse on Maui too, and now we’re looking at statements to see how Honolulu’s government is spending your taxpayer money.

Always Investigating has reviewed all islands’ county credit card spending patterns. On Oahu, that meant a look at not just city hall but also the semi-autonomous agencies of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation and Board of Water Supply.

Since 2013, Honolulu County has rung up $55 million on more than 600 pCards, something that’s billed as saving time and administrative costs over the purchase-order system.

Always Investigating zoomed in on spending by, or on behalf of, all county department heads and the mayor’s office. Over the past few years, that totals just over $3 million on plastic. The city administration’s tab was mostly for office, like cellular phone bills and supplies. About $400,000 was spend on travel for conferences and official business, also about $46,000 on gifts, flowers and lei.

Every line item had a description of county purpose. Budget director Nelson Koyanagi said they “annually review the departments’ pCard programs for compliance.” They’ve never had to revoke one for misuse.

KHON2 tallied $123,000 county card spending at the Honolulu City Council offices over the same period, about half-and-half in terms of office expenses ($53,000) vs. travel ($45,000) and about $5,000 on gifts and flowers.

The administration gave us their data on a handy disk with spreadsheets easy to search sort and tally with all kinds of purchase details. Honolulu City Council emailed a concise, searchable attachment with all the background info on it.

Board of Water Supply, on the other hand, produced about 700 hard-copy pages, two-sided statement copies, nothing electronic. We reviewed each expense line by line, converted it into a format that could be computer-analyzed and totaled, and here’s what we found: more than $5 million from your water bills going to pay their pCard bills, and not all on what you might think.

A sample month trend reveals that under half was spent on equipment, tools and supplies necessary to keep the water flowing, and 31 percent of it went toward automotive and auto repair, even a big hunk on multiple charges for tow trucks. There were a whole bunch of charges for office supplies, and tens of thousands of dollars on shoes, assumed to be work boots, and apparel.

The Board of Water Supply says the auto costs are so high because they have a fleet of 475, everything from sedans to trucks to trailers, and do mostly their own repairs.

Over now to the rail authority, under scrutiny with a project nearly $1 billion in the red. The pCards aren’t contributing much to the deficit. In their entire history of pCard spending, all the way back to 2011, HART has spent a total of just over $641,000.

The majority was on office bills including a lot of teleconferencing. When employees did travel or hold trainings, it added up to about $150,000. Advertising spending topped six figures and there was a tidbit on food and beverage.

Whereas many agencies let pCard holders ring things up first and document later, HART’s CEO Dan Grabauskas told us they do it differently. “All pCard purchases must be preapproved by managers and our CFO before pCard expenditures are incurred by HART,” he said.

Nothing on Oahu that we found so far jumps out as misuse, unlike with the Big Island mayor’s spending patterns, and the infamous covert kitchen on Maui.

The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation opened contract bids for the West Oahu station group Tuesday.

The group consists of the East Kapolei, UH-West Oahu and Hoopili stations.

The contract, which has yet to be awarded, will likely go to the lowest bidder, Nan Inc., which is fresh off a failed protest for the previous rail contract to build three rail stations in Waipahu.

Bidder

Total of all bid items (from lowest to highest)

Nan Inc.

$56,088,470

Watts Constructors

$66,543,692

Hensel Phelps

$67,234,000

Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co.

$73,400,000

The first contract, to build stations at Leeward Community College, Waipahu Transit Center and West Loch, was ultimately awarded to Hawaiian Dredging Construction Co.

HART made the announcement last week, even though bids for that job were opened in March with Hawaiian Dredging as the apparent low bidder. The award was delayed due to a protest and appeal filed by Nan Inc., the second-lowest bidder.

“Does this make for a prickly working relationship if this bid sticks?” Always Investigating asked.

“Not at all. Protest is part of the business. We are already doing business with the apparent low bidder. They are doing utility relocation work as a contractor in the airport section,” said HART CEO Dan Grabauskas.

HART had expected construction for the West Oahu station group to cost as much as $80 million, but the amounts listed Tuesday all came in at the lower end of that estimate. The lowest from Nan Inc. came in below even that.

They were also all significantly lower than the Waipahu contract, which totaled $78.9 million. Officials say that’s because the West Oahu station group will be easier to build.

“If you’re looking at Hoopili station, you don’t have to worry about lane closures, road closures. It’s in virgin territory so the contractor is going to have real free access to be able to do that construction and not have to worry about removing cones before rush hour,” Grabauskas explained.

If this round of bidding isn’t protested by someone else, the contract could be set within weeks.

HART purposely chose to build the Waipahu stations first. “For testing purposes, we want to create a mini version of our rail system, (which would consist of a) guideway, a few stations and the rail operations center, so when the trains go up for testing, they’ll actually be able to test in that smaller portion and we want to do that first,” Grabauskas said.

A request for contract bids for the Kamehameha Highway station group, which includes the Pearl Highlands, Pearlridge and Aloha Stadium stations, will be issued in August and costs will likely escalate as work approaches town.

“It’s not going to be the stations so much as the logistics to build the stations, the traffic, congestion, a smaller, tighter footprint. It’s going to be a real challenge,” Grabauskas said. “In our right-of-way acquisitions, we are still running about $10 (million) to $11 million below our budget. Even though we may need to go through some eminent domain process to gain possession of the property in time to give it to the construction company, that shouldn’t change our price.”

The original nine-station contract was broken into three smaller contract packages to encourage broader participation by contractors during the bidding process and create more competitive prices, HART said.

HART also expects to ask the city council late this summer or in early fall if it can borrow hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of bonds.

An investigation into misspending on Maui has resulted in some changes, but so far no findings of criminal wrongdoing.

It’s a story Always Investigating uncovered last month as we continue to look into state and county spending of taxpayer money using government credit cards, or pCards.

Although several Maui County workers were under investigation for their pCard use, Always Investigating has learned that no one has been charged or prosecuted in connection with any of the allegations, though the administration is continuing to do interviews and retain evidence.

Sources previously revealed a former district supervisor at the Wailuku Public Works Baseyard built out a commercial kitchen at the site that rivals a restaurant, paid for on his pCard with none of it approved by the county.

So will the misspending result in criminal charges? One month later and counting, and Maui police say they’ve still got nothing. In a statement, Lt. William Juan said, “Nothing has been referred to the Maui Police Department regarding this matter.”

Prosecutors had said before that they can’t make a move without MPD.

County councilman Mike Victorino has put pCard spending on a policy committee agenda for next Tuesday.

“During this meeting, this might be a thing to poke the administration and say, okay, give us an update at least,” said Don Couch, the committee’s vice-chair. “I know how long it takes investigations to happen sometimes. We’ve still got stuff that’s years old that they’re trying to investigate and wrap up.”

Since our initial investigation, Always Investigating has gotten a copy of the district supervisor’s purchasing card agreement from 2010. He signed off saying he’d use it ethically.

We’ve also gotten his retirement paperwork, which shows the county let him sign off in good standing, meaning he still gets a pension, and sources say he has agreed to pay back tens of thousands of dollars over time.

Meanwhile, the fancy kitchen items remain locked up at the baseyard.

“There needs to be a backup or some sort of audit on how the procedure is that allowed some of this stuff to go through,” Couch said.

Always Investigating has also been asking for the retiree’s pCard statements, but the administration still says he’s “under investigation,” so they can’t release the money log yet.

The fact that it’s an ongoing investigation leaves open the possibility of prosecution.

The kitchen wasn’t the only case of possible pCard misuse. Always Investigating found out several other employees were also under investigation.

We still can’t get three of those questioned pCard statements either, some of which have to do with automotive spending by the parks department involving repair and maintenance taking place under the bleachers.

Those classified last month as under investigation still hold the county cards, but have had spending limits reduced. The county won’t say by how much.

The council may urge more action.

“I am surprised that it is not as tight as our setup is. I would like to see it so there are stricter controls,” Couch said. “There have to be some kind of checks and balances of what the controls are and can they be made better.”

It was known as the Pacific Proving Grounds, atolls bombed for nuclear testing starting in the 1940s. Decades later, soldiers and civilians in support roles were sent to the Marshall Islands to clean up the nuclear waste.

They want to be recognized as “Atomic Veterans” for the health and other benefits the government has paid other service members exposed to nuclear testing years earlier. There are thousands of cleanup veterans, many already dead from radiation-related diseases.

After Bikini Atoll, many of the tests were carried out along the Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands.

“These islands held 1.6 explosiveness — the same as Hiroshima — per day for 12 years,” said Ken Kasik, a civilian who ran the military exchange commissary in the Marshall Islands in the late 1970s.

American military servicemen observed those tests from offshore.

“They were all made to sit on the deck of the destroyer back-to-back, cross-legged,” one testing veteran who died of cancer had said in a story recounted by Oliver Morgan, a cleanup veteran who came to the islands later. “They could actually see through the guy in front of them because the light was so intense. You could see the X-ray bones of the guy in front of you.”

Military service members in the Pacific for the tests are, to the Department of Veterans Affairs, recognized as “Atomic Veterans.” So are other participants in above-ground nuclear tests elsewhere – such as in Nevada on the mainland — and those near Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Atomic Vets and their surviving families get radiation exposure compensation and health benefits.

But that’s not the case for thousands of American service members who, years later, cleaned up America’s nuclear waste in areas still hot with radiation.

“There was no fresh water,” Kasik said of the conditions service members endured in the Marshall Islands cleanup. “They had to make the water out of the contaminated ocean water.”

Kasik flipped through photos he took of soldiers working in the dirt. “This is radiation,” he said. “This is everybody working in 110-degree heat, no protection. It’s a minefield of radiation.”

“Every now and then, they would make us drive our dozers and trucks out into the surf to clean off the soil because the dozer was too contaminated,” said Morgan, who was assigned to the Marshall Islands when he was serving with the Army in the late 1970s.

They had no safety equipment.

“We were basically in boots, shorts, T-shirt and a hat. The T-shirt was optional,” Morgan said. Photos showed many shirtless soldiers shoveling the contaminated soil.

“The debris they collected that they put in the vehicles and put on the boats to send to the island to dump into the hole was the same vehicle that took the guys back to work or back to the islands,” Kasik said of the people-movers that doubled as dump trucks. “There was never any decontamination.”

The level of contamination was known. Kasik shows KHON2 two radiation-measurement gadgets he kept from his time in Marshall Islands.

“If your badge turns red, get the heck out of there immediately, but there’s nowhere to go,” he said.

After Kasik’s shifts at the exchange store, he would help some military personnel log nightly radiation gadget readings.

“At the end of the night, it would all be added up and averaged in,” Kasik said. “So if you have one personnel that had been in a real hot danger zone the whole day and his badge was glowing, but you had 10 personnel that didn’t even leave the island and their badges were red and they were all clean, you would average the 11 people together and then you would throw it away.”

Many of the cleanup veterans and civilians are dead due to a high rate of cancer. Many others are sick, as are many civilians who were there too.

“I had 37 cancer spots removed. I had 57 biopsies,” Kasik said. “The other guys that were actually out there and digging in the dirt and breathing all this continually are the ones that are really sick and have gotten internal cancers, brain cancers, tumors.”

Sick veterans like Morgan suspect their families are touched too, but they and their families have been denied care. He recounts name after name of soldiers from the cleanup who have already died of cancers of the lung, brain and other organs. Many were in their 30s to late 40s, some made it as long as their early 50s.

He calculates a 35-percent cancer rate just among the numbers he knows.

“Their common denominator is that they were all stationed at Lojwa at one time or another in their life, and they weren’t all there at the same time,” Morgan said. “They’ve all either died of cancer or are in remission at this moment. They basically have to fight tooth and nail to get treatment from VA because they were ‘never there’ or they weren’t ‘exposed to enough radiation’ to give them cancer.

“We as veterans and as civilians that worked there, we would like to be acknowledged as Atomic Veterans,” Morgan continued, “because if we do become sick, we want to be taken care of medically. Cancer is not a cheap way to go, and we don’t want our wives and children to be burdened with the cost of taking care of us. The Atomic Veterans, they get medical, they get their spouses and children get $75,000.”

The veterans from the cleanup phase are now as young as their mid-50s, but battling chronic ailments far too young compared to their counterparts who didn’t serve in a hot zone.

“I’ve got acute bronchitis,” Morgan said of his own ailments. “I went to the VA here at Tripler (Army Medical Center) and tried to put in a claim as a nuclear veteran. A month or two went by and I went back to check, and the guy basically told me we have no record of you ever being there… I was like, wow, do basically you’re making me feel like I’m trying to steal valor?”

Morgan was sent to the Marshall Islands in the late 1970s when stationed with the 84th Engineers B Company at Schofield Barracks, but his service record for the time, critical to getting VA-service-related health and disability, just refers to “Hawaii.”

That DD-214 service record says nothing of the jaunt to the South Pacific even though KHON2 reviewed photos showing Morgan on the scene, in the cleanup zone, in the late 1970s.

“We’re trying to get our government to basically acknowledge we were even there,” Morgan said.

“We have a problem. These were controlled islands. We are not allowed any information about who was there,” Kasik said. “Everybody that went there, the U.S. government knows who they were and when they were there. They were put on those boats, toured the islands, went up to Lojwa. They were taken off and were told ‘You’re gonna live here and you’re gonna work here.’ Our vets have to somehow prove they were on this island. The only proof they have some of them is pictures that we’ve taken. The U.S. government is saying they were never on that island.”

The U.S. Army Pacific told Always Investigating they “don’t retain and can’t research individual records,” and that each individual vet, or their surviving family, has to go through the National Archives.

“They put all of us on the Lojwa base camp. It’s in the danger field,” Kasik explained. “The northern islands, these are all the hot islands. This is Enewetak (Atoll) way down here. This is Runit where they dumped all the contamination. What they did was pick one island, Lojwa, which is still in the danger zone, and they said will be safe enough as a base camp, and every day we’ll boat our boys from Lojwa up to the cleanup.”

But even if they proved they were there, the veterans still aren’t being included in the Atomic Veterans category, something U.S. Rep. Mark Takai, D-Hawaii, says lawmakers could fight to fix.

“Clearly if they were like the VA treats everybody else, including the veterans of today,” Takai said, “they would be rated as service-connected disability and they would be provided with care.”

When Takai was in the state legislature in Hawaii, he led efforts to ask the federal government to count these cleanup personnel as Atomic Veterans (HCR 247).

Always Investigating followed up with Takai now that he’s in Congress, and Takai then sent the Department of Veterans Affairs a proposal in writing (read the letter in its entirety here).

“We’re asking them to expand the definition of a veteran in this particular class and we’re hoping for the best,” Takai said. “What would be easiest is for the VA to acknowledge it and to make a change.”

If the VA says “sorry can’t do,” Takai told KHON2 he’ll work on a law. He also said helping each veteran prove their presence at the cleanup should be something the military and VA can be more helpful with.

“There are records somewhere clearly, and we’ve just got to work toward making that information available,” Takai said. “There might not be one list, there might be some information on how they got there, there might be a manifest, but it’s always better to have it on the service member.”

Short of being recognized as Atomic Veterans for the other benefits, the U.S. Army does have one avenue for assessing at least the health impact for now. The U.S. Army’s Pentagon office in told KHON2, “If the U.S. Army were contacted by the veterans administration or a veteran looking for assistance, we would estimate their potential service exposures under our Veterans Radiation Exposure Investigation Program,” said Army spokesman Dave Foster.

As for broadening the definition of Atomic Veterans, Takai says what America is doing now, not only for other Atomic Veterans, but for the Marshallese, should set a precedent.

“The Compact of Free Association, COFA, allows for pretty much unfettered access of Marshallese to come to Hawaii or elsewhere,” Takai said. “The federal government is acknowledging that because of the fallout, the Marshallese have health conditions that they need addressing, and we’re also addressing educational and housing as well. That’s an obligation we made to those people decades ago. I think that obligation should extend to service members who went back to those islands and addressed the fallout, addressed the nuclear waste that was still there.”

“The federal government is basically paying for their housing, medical, public assistance, schools. It’s costing the federal government hundreds of millions a year to take care of these people,” Morgan said of the Marshallese. “But us? Basically nothing. We’re the forgotten few.”

Where was the air medical evacuation, or medevac, following last weekend’s deadly Osprey military aircraft crash in Waimanalo?

It’s a question being asked after reports of victims being rushed to hospitals in the back of a pickup truck and even TheHandi-Van.

Always Investigating took that question to all of the military branches involved in the incident. In doing so, we uncovered more details on what happened before and after Sunday’s training exercise, and what precautions were taken before the training had even started.

Always Investigating found the military planned for safety, but perhaps did not plan for the worst.

The Marines in Hawaii and the visiting unit out of California outlined in advance the kind of safety response they’d have ready if an incident happened in Waimanalo. But an examination of the time between the crash and critical care shows more may need to be done in the future.

Always Investigating compiled official military, emergency services, radio dispatch, hospital and witness accounts, and reporter logs of Sunday’s events to detail what happened that tragic day at Bellows on Sunday, May 1.

Minutes later, military on the ground and nearby civilians scaling the barbed wire fence between the beach and wreckage head straight into the danger zone to help. One Marine, Barron, died at the scene. A pickup truck with two injured Marines and a good Samaritan aboard departs for Castle Medical Center, a 10-mile drive, but the closest emergency room.

11:29 a.m. Military on the scene call for fire and EMS backup, as do four other bystanders who dial 9-1-1 about the downed aircraft.

12:13 p.m. An ambulance departs the scene to Queen’s Medical Center which is the island’s highest-level trauma care hospital, 13 miles away. That first ambulance carries two in serious condition and arrives at Queen’s at 12:39 p.m.

“That’s pretty bad to be that far from a hospital that can take care of seriously injured people,” said former test pilot and aircraft designer Pierre Sprey. “If you’re going to have major exercises where you think you might have a problem either with the ground part of the maneuver or the air part of the maneuver, it makes sense to have a medevac on standby.”

City EMS has not had air evacuation resources to call on for about a decade, when Schofield Barracks and the Hawaii National Guard helicopters got prioritized to wartime functions instead. Military sources say they’ve had Navy helicopters and medics on standby as a medevac backup for other Marines exercises in Hawaii.

“Standby medevac support may be arranged for training conducted in very remote areas based on risk assessments,” Agnes Tauyan, director of public affairs for Navy Region Hawaii, told KHON2. “But is not common here on Oahu.”

KHON2 dug into the procedures and planning that came before the training flights even started Sunday.

“Safety requirements, to include MEDEVAC plans and responses, are the responsibility of the Range Control office that runs the training site, in this case Marine Corps Training Area, Bellows, Marine Corps Base Hawaii,” explained Capt. Brian Block, spokesman for the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit, in from California for the USS Essex exercises with the Ospreys.

“The Marine Corps Base Hawaii does not possess medevac capabilities,” said Elizabeth Feeney from the Public Affairs Office of the Kaneohe base. “We rely on the expertise of first responders, to include Military first responders, Honolulu Fire Department and Emergency Medical Services. The care plan, as coordinated through the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit and Marine Corps Base Hawaii, planned for ground medevac to the closest medical care facility, which in this case was Castle Medical Center… That plan was implemented. It’s important to clarify that the medical response procedures were examined prior to training, and ground transport was determined to be the quickest and most effective medical response option.”

The Navy told Always Investigating, “In the case of this recent training event, a standby medevac was not requested.”

“As a user of the range, we provided the required organic safety personnel (a range safety officer at training area) and an overall officer-in-charge, safety vehicle, and a corpsman for all of the training occurring that day,” Block said of the resources contributed by the 15th MEU.
That unit, and the Marine Corps Base Hawaii, outlined all of that in advance in their safety plan, but there is not a standard operating procedure requiring air backup.

“You evaluate each situation uniquely,” explained Rich Martindell, an aviation and safety consultant based in San Diego. “You take a look at it, you assess whether the threat is high or low. An offsite landing for an Osprey is a pretty normal operation.”

But it’s an operation Sprey says carries great risk.

“It’s one thing if they’re just flying V-22s with just a pilot and a copilot,” Sprey said. “But when they’ve got it filled up with 22 Marines, that’s another thing and especially if they’re going to be doing landing exercises.”

That’s because a common Osprey landing problem called “wing vortex state” causes a loss of control of one of the wings. Sprey says there’s nothing that can be done about it and it’s a deadly problem that has killed dozens of other Marines in training.

KHON2 asked both aviation experts what should be done in the future in these kinds of exercises at that location?

“I think they would certainly take a look at air support,” Martindell said. “It’s just a matter of whether or not you’ve got a helicopter available or another Osprey available. It depends upon the (size of the hospital) helipad, but in most cases it doesn’t take anything much larger than a helipad to land an Osprey on.”

“If you’re trying to exercise the way you would in combat, you’d better have a medevac helicopter on hand,” Sprey said. “And you definitely want to do it way away from where people have houses, because once that thing starts burning, you have really toxic smoke coming off the composite. The airplane is 30 percent composite. When that stuff burns it creates a lung-corrosive poison that’ll blow for miles.”

The California and Kaneohe Marines and the Navy praised selfless actions of all responders, military, first-responder and civilian. It remains to be seen if next time around those responders will include air backup.

“As we do after any event, we’ll review our procedures during our after action review and consult with EMS if necessary,” Feeney from MCBH said.

“Medevac avoids the whole problem of the distance to the trauma center,” Sprey said. “You certainly don’t want to move the training closer to the urban areas.”

“The response to Sunday’s mishap is both a testament to the professionalism and skill of the EMS and range personnel involved, and a truly heartwarming display of heroism on the part of civilian bystanders who chose to risk their own safety to care for our Marines,” 15th MEU’s Block said. “Words cannot adequately express our gratitude to all of them.”

“There was immediate and overwhelming support from the community, Honolulu Fire Department, Emergency Medical Services, Bellows Air Force Station, Federal Fire Department, and the MCBH Aircraft Rescue Firefighting,” MCBH’s Feeney said. “For that they will have our eternal gratitude. The heroic actions of everyone that responded, without regard to their own safety, is a testament to the bonds we have with our community, and we can’t thank them enough for rendering immediate aid.”

“During the tragic accident on May 17, civilian and military responders accessed the downed aircraft as quickly as possible,” the Navy’s Tauyan said. “We’re thankful for all who rendered aid to our Marines, including civilian bystanders.”

“Honolulu EMS responded with more than two dozen personnel. This was a mass casualty situation where crews determined the number of patients, extent of injuries and appropriate transport and hospital,” said Honolulu EMS spokesperson Shayne Enright. “EMS is very grateful to the other agencies who co-responded to this incident.”

]]>http://khon2.com/2015/05/18/work-furlough-prison-escapes-2012/feed/0Tue, 19 May 2015 11:43:21 +0000khonjaredkuroiwaInmate escapes on the rise but court and crime consequences often laxhttp://khon2.com/2015/05/18/inmate-escapes-on-the-rise-but-court-and-crime-consequences-often-lax/
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Inmate escapes have nearly tripled in Hawaii over the past few years and every time it happens, officials say there will be consequences.

So why are there so many if the punishment is supposedly so stiff? Always Investigating found some surprising breakdowns in the system.

There are dozens of felons who have escaped from prison and work furlough — some of them years ago — who have not had the often-promised escape charges tacked on to their records and sentences. So who is to blame?

It may sound like old news every time we report another jail escape or furlough walkway. It’s almost a weekly pace. The number has nearly tripled in just a few years, from 19 in 2012 to 54 last year and 22 so far this year alone.

This follows a doubling of inmates given work furlough privileges in the same period, and most of the escapes are people in that program.

“They had not shown any signs that they would participate in that kind of activity,” said Nolan Espinda, director of the Department of Public Safety. “Obviously if they had, we would not have put them in the program.”

Espinda points out these rarely take a dangerous turn.

“Less that one percent of them have committed actual crimes,” Espinda said. “Less than six percent of them actually walk away.”

Those one percent of crimes include the kidnapping, drug and law enforcement impersonation crime spree Robert Gibson and Kalai Tavares were arrested for last month when they were supposed to be out on furlough looking for work.

They’re being charged for all those crimes and you’d think for escape as well, but “that is not an escape,” explained Honolulu prosecutor Keith Kaneshiro. “They committed the crime while they were on work furlough, while they were authorized to leave the facility.”

Gibson and Tavares are among several people on the prison department’s escape list who, it turns out, will not be charged with it.

A handful of other cases referred to prosecutors were declined too. Always Investigating merged the prison escape list with every escape case in court through Judiciary records, along with multiple other crime and incarceration databases. We found 44 escapes since 2012, about one third of all getaways, have no escape case at all.

Always Investigating started making calls on each and every one, like the oldest non-charged escape of Daniel Holcombe, who evaded custody for two months in the summer of 2013 on Maui.

“We did not receive any reports from the Maui Police Department but we are able to obtain one today,” said Maui prosecutor John Kim after Always Investigating called to check.

Why wasn’t it sent to prosecutors sooner?

“I know one detective retired that I believe was assigned to the Holcombe case,” Kim said.

That’s not the only case in limbo. Always Investigating found cases across the state stalled just about every step of the way, from corrections workers unresponsive to police, to police not referring cases to prosecutors yet, files found in prosecutors’ offices after we called, some stalled without explanation yet somewhere along the line, and many others where the agencies are debating who is responsible.

Sometimes during all this back and forth, some people are going outright free, including a registered sex offender who didn’t get charged with escape, served his other time and got out.

The prison department says life gets tougher for the inmate regardless of whether the escape gets charged.

“We process them for an escape charge, a misconduct escape charge that stays with them for five years,” Espinda said. “As long as they stay incarcerated, they’re not going to be eligible to even be considered for something of a less-secure nature for the next five years. So the consequences of this internally are dramatic.”

But that’s only for as long as they’re in custody. Just under half of the 129 escapes since 2012 have been convicted for it, and of those, some got probation and most are getting the standard 5-year sentences.

But even those five years are usually not tacked to the end of their other time. Instead, they’re handed out concurrently and judges are giving getting credit for time served. Always Investigating found some who walked out of jail free as soon as a year and a half after their escape.

As for those charged but not yet convicted, about 16 pending cases, some escaped back in 2013.

It’s far from swift justice for some of these cases, but why?

“A lot of times, it’s continued at the request of defense attorneys, not at our request,” Kaneshiro said. “We try to resolve as soon as possible because the sooner we resolve the case, the better it is.”

Always Investigating’s calls on these cases got agencies talking again about the status of stalled escape charges. We’ll follow up to see what happens.

Always Investigating has been digging deeper to find out more about the MV-22 Osprey.

The Osprey that crashed at Bellows was based in San Diego, but the Kaneohe Marine Corps Base also received Ospreys back in 2012.

The base was scheduled to get 24 of them.

This Osprey is billed as having the speed of a turbo-prop airplane and the ability to move and tilt like a helicopter.

It’s currently being used in overseas military missions as well.

The Osprey was in testing for years and during testing, there were crashes that killed 30 people.

Subsequently, a series of performance enhancements were incorporated to improve safety.

Fatal and costly crashes continued in the years after testing was done and deployment was underway.

Many call today’s incident in Hawaii tragic, though, not surprising. Some say it’s unlikely to change the course of the Osprey program especially in the Marines.

At the tail end of more than a decade of training, a fatal Osprey crash that killed 19 in the year 2000 brought a program pause, congressional inquiry, technical review and some redesign, but within years the program was operational and the $100-million-a-piece aircraft were rolling through production.

While critics said such things as “these aircraft should never have been purchased without resolving design problems and safety hazards,” the Marine Corps went essentially all-in, ordering hundreds and phasing out its other helicopters.

The fatal crashes slowed but didn’t stop. Many in Japan protested before Ospreys went to the U.S. base in Okinawa a few years ago.

“Most of the problems with this aircraft took place within the 10-year testing period,” said Dr. John Hart, Hawaii Pacific University’s Department of Communication Chair. “It’s been a relatively safe aircraft since it’s been operational in 2007. The Japanese currently like this aircraft, we have put them on this aircraft. This is a tragedy but I don’t see this being a foreign policy issue .”

Always Investigating asked if Hart believes that this might change how we approach or welcome training here in the islands?

“No, I don’t think so, sadly these kind of things happen, this is why you close sets off to the public while you are training,” answered Hart. “Since it’s been operational there have only been approximately three crashes, one of them in combat. This is a relatively safe plane. It’s the best copter they have.”

The program is still the subject of controversy especially after the Department of Defense’s own Inspector General flagged safety and readiness concerns, saying Marine Corps squadron commanders reports on the V-22 were incomplete or inaccurate and concluded, “Senior DoD and Marine Corps officials could have deployed MV-22 squadrons that were not prepared for missions.”

Always Investigating will continue to keep track and report back on any changes or pauses of Osprey operations at the armed forces bases here in Hawaii in the wake of today’s incident.

The Hawaii Air National Guard at this time does not have the Ospreys in its fleet and does not train on them.

One name on the court list stuck out, 2012 furlough program walkaway Ryan Jeffries-Hamar, a felon with 51 arrests and 17 convictions.

He’d been given work furlough, but decided to run away from a drug test and wasn’t arrested until a month later. That got him kicked out of furlough, and a charge of escape in the second degree.

But within months, authorities say Jeffries-Hamar teamed up fellow inmate Jarvis Higa and staged a violent breakout from Hawaii Community Correctional Center. Officials say they punched and dragged a corrections officer, stole a staffer’s car and got away.

‘It was very serious and dramatic. I knew a lot of people who lived by the jail and people who came and talked to me who lived in Hilo and people were afraid, the whole island. These guys were on the run,” said Hawaii County prosecutor Mitch Roth.

Jeffries-Hamar was convicted for escape in the first degree while Higa’s case is still dragging on years later.

We checked and the attorney general’s office says the investigation is done and the case is being reviewed for possible charges.

While those cases linger on, lawmakers put the public safety department in the hot seat Tuesday to discuss changes to the work furlough program.

Officials said the higher number of escapes could be due to the hundreds of inmates that just got added to the program. Many more are qualified, but not yet on furlough.

“We have a current wait list of inmates who are technically eligible to participate but for a lack of that type of bed space, that wait list is currently at 158,” said public safety director Nolan Espinda.

There were some ideas to reduce that backlog, like contracting out private facilities to house and monitor more work furlough inmates.

As for cutting back on the walkaways, there were talks to get funding for electronic monitoring, cell phones that inmates can use to check in while at work and a mentorship program where current inmates can work with furlough parolees.

One lawmaker even suggested the internal punishments are too harsh.

“Just for being late, for three days I’m late, I can ban you from work furlough for five to eight years? You made that comment,” Sen. Will Espero, vice chair of the Senate public safety committee, said to DPS director Nolan Espinda.

“That’s not a comment. It’s a fact,” he replied.

“I know. It seems a little harsh to me,” Espero said.

“It may seem a little harsh, but there are parameters you live by in a program and you cannot be deviating and participating in inappropriate behavior and then expect us to continue to give you chance after chance,” Espinda responded.

That furlough chance has been taken away from the 129 who have escaped and walked away over the past three years, 22 so far this year.

“I’m sorry if I have little compassion for the 22 people who deviate, but my concern is for the 420 people who are participating and I want them to succeed,” Espinda said.

Always Investigating sat down with Dave, a work furlough graduate whose prison term is now done. He said thousands of others like him did furlough right.

“I got a chance for me to get on my feet, a job, save money. I got a moped now. It got me the opportunity to straighten out my life,” he said.

“There are a lot of rules in work furlough. Did you sign an agreement?” Always Investigating asked.

“Yes, I did,” he replied. “Definitely took it seriously.”

“What did you think would happen if you broke any rules?” Always Investigating asked.

“That I would be going back to Halawa (Correctional Facility) and maybe even (Saguaro Correctional Center in) Arizona,” he said. “If you don’t have this program, you’re just going to be recycling criminals.”

Now, Always Investigating has uncovered another one affecting the entire West Maui community.

What public school wouldn’t want a new library, athletic field or stadium? Yet time and again, these signature projects run on for years longer than anticipated.

More than 10 years ago, a new stadium was envisioned for Lahainaluna High School on Maui. The project is finally just about at the end, but what’s holding it up from getting an opening day?

“We thought we would have our football games here,” said Lahainaluna principal Emily De Costa, “and that was exciting because we usually travel to the other side.”

That drive all the way to Wailuku and back was supposed to be pau last fall.

“That didn’t happen. Then we said maybe our homecoming game, and that didn’t happen,” De Costa said. “Then it was soccer and that didn’t happen. Then January, that didn’t happen. Now it’s May. We wanted graduation really bad, and it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.”

The Lahainaluna stadium is the latest school project that somehow got stuck in slow motion, similar to Waialua Elementary School’s library, which was four years in the making, and McKinley High School’s softball field, which took two years to build plus two years just to approve for use.

The Maui stadium idea sparked 10 years ago with money flowing by 2007 and construction within a few years, but a projected opening day already in the past.

Jeff Rogers of the Lahainaluna High School Foundation explained some of the bumps in the road.

“From the time this was originally designed in 2007 and then when we were ready to build out in 2014, the building code changed,” he said.

That meant a redesign, even a doubling of required bathroom stalls. There were differences of expert opinion on this or that kind of fire system.

Then there were the many miles between the Department of Education’s facilities branch in Honolulu and the project team on Maui.

“There have just been things that have occurred through no fault of anyone’s that just happened, many surprises,” Rogers said.

Always Investigating asked, could anyone have seen them coming if there had been any different way of working on the project?

“Hard to say, hard to Monday morning quarterback that,” Rogers said. “Of course, everybody thinks their project is special. Looking back, it would have been nice to have a little more direct contact with the decision makers in Honolulu.”

The project is special because of its major donor, Sue D. Cooley, a part-time resident from the mainland who happened to come to a Lahainaluna playoff football game with a school alum, a game the Lunas lost.

“The team was exiting by the boy’s locker room and they were singing the alma mater,” Rogers said. “She was so impressed with the way they handled themselves and be able to have that kind of sportsmanship, and she just asked, what can she do?”

The alum mentioned the stadium vision and she pledged $1 million. She went on to give another $6.5 million over the years, shaving the state’s share to just $1.7 million in grants.

“It benefited the state and the taxpayers, you and I,” De Costa said. “It doesn’t come out of our pockets.”

If the DOE had done the project, De Costa said their estimate would have been closer to $17 million, nearly double the $9 million that the private foundation was able to do the project for. But the DOE still had to approve all the ins and outs of the project while the foundation did the legwork.

“This is the biggest private-public partnership that they had experienced,” Rogers said, “so we both had a giant learning curve.”

“In this particular case, we have been learning lessons from a public-private partnership. In other cases, we are hampered sometimes by the fact that with the low-bid process, we can be left with contractors who have not been fully capable of fulfilling their roles,” explained assistant superintendent Dann Carlson.

“Since I have come on board five months ago, we have begun reviewing where we can be more efficient, identify gaps and improve our process. We are preparing to make some changes to the process,” he added. “We know we need more project managers. We have been actively recruiting project managers in the positions of architects and engineers through our human resources office and will be at an upcoming job fair.”

“Especially when someone is giving us a building, I am sure they are trying every which way they can,” De Costa said, “but like everything else, when you are in a bureaucracy, yes there’s a lot of red tape.”

There will be a few more sticky spots ahead. Maui County lists a slew of open inspection items. The stadium’s 3,000 seats have to sit empty until all the sections get certificates of occupancy.

Rogers says Cooley “probably wouldn’t be too happy (with all the delays). She’s been very patient.”

Always Investigating asked, if this place could get its final inspections in the coming days, what would they like to see happen?

“I would love to see graduation here,” Rogers said.

“I would like to say yes, but there are so many logistics that have to go on,” De Costa said.

So for now, the graduation ceremony is slated to be held just up above, at Boarder’s Field near the dormitories, named for the nearby boarders. Lahainaluna is one of two Hawaii public schools that boards students.

Boarder’s Field is where this oldest public high school west of the Mississippi — founded in 1831 — has had many a graduation ceremony, followed always by the lighting of the “L” on the mountaintop.

“This graduation class will have memories no matter where it’s at,” De Costa said. “Some of them want it there, and yet some of them want it here. There’s mixed feelings among the students. No matter where graduation is, it will be either their first here or their last at Boarder’s Field.”

Put in your time at work, you expect an on-time paycheck, usually by direct deposit for most of us these days.

But Always Investigating found the state’s out-of-date paper system can delay payday for thousands of public workers.

Even if you’re not a state worker it can affect you, because all of that manual processing has cost taxpayers millions in overpayments that are very hard to get back.

In the olden days, the state payroll offices had paper everywhere, tens of thousands of paychecks relying on manual steps. Today, it looks like that still, stuck in the past thanks to old systems.

The man in charge of the Department of Accounting and General Services, comptroller Douglas Murdock, thought this when he first stepped into the time machine upon taking office a few months ago.

“I saw a lot of people working really hard on bad systems that were antiquated, and they were heroically making things happen that were almost impossible given how old the systems were,” he said. “It’s surprising to see so many boxes of paper and that everything has to flow through paper instead of electronic.”

Systems that are 40, sometimes 50, years old crunch along often on parts sought online, including at the state’s biggest single department, education, tucked in the basement of the central Department of Education’s administration building, where stacks and stacks of colored cards are considered the payroll database.

“Each employee has a card for a year,” explained Amy Kunz, the DOE’s chief financial officer and senior assistant superintendent at the Office of Fiscal Services. “Anything that happens, any time off, any adjustments happen on this card.

“We are very paper based in our payroll,” Kunz added. “Any time-off forms, even address changes, everything is done via a piece of paper that gets submitted to human resources. Human resources has to touch that piece of paper and then it gets to payroll.”

That’s just to get the numbers crunched to get handed to someone else to type into an old-fashioned green-screen computer. Trees weep as paper checks churn off the printer all day long.

For those who think they have direct deposit? Not quite.

“Sometimes, we actually have to send a check by first-class mail and then the bank routes the money into the holder’s account,” Murdock said. “It’s not what most people would expect to see when they see direct deposit.”

Say you have a rural post office with shorter hours, or your bank or credit union for some reason doesn’t get the check. You may find yourself, as others did, asking Always Investigating: Why is the state paying me late?

“I had a Texas bank at one time, when I first started working for the state,” Murdock recalled, “and it took a week or two to get my check in my account, so I felt that myself.”

Another side effect of manual payroll notes is overpayment of taxpayer dollars to state workers when it turns out they weren’t at work, didn’t really have that much paid vacation left or they retired a while ago.

“When people retire, they shouldn’t continue to get paid for the next week,” Murdock said, “because that becomes an overpayment we have to track and try and recover.”

But they’ve only got two years under state law to find the overpayment and collect. That tab stands at $1.35 million over the years, with the most overpayments to the DOE.

“We have about $350,000, that is cumulative over many, many years,” Kunz said, “and that’s compared to about $1 billion of annual payroll we pay.”

“The overpayments are substantial and it’s hard to recover back from somebody once you give them the money, so we have to make sure we give them the right amount the first time,” Murdock said. “These (new) systems should make us able to respond to these things more quickly and have the right numbers the first time.”

The new systems Murdock is talking about are still in the works even after Gov. David Ige pulled the plug on his predecessor’s massive across-the-board tech overhaul. That cancelled high-tech project was still five years away from being up and running.

Murdock thinks payroll could be automated faster, in one to two years.

“We’re still investing in technology and actually I think we’ll get these things done more quickly because we can focus in on the things we need the most,” Murdock said. “We’re going to get to a process where it’s done end-to-end electronically, where there are no delays except for the quality checks we do to make sure that we are getting everything right.”

Always Investigating has been digging into the government credit card or pCard system for months, pouring over records from a wide range of departments, agencies and counties. Misuse of county credit cards is at the center of investigations on the Big Island and Maui.

The state auditor had found years ago that there was too much of a hands-off approach to pCards and the system has not changed since.

More than a decade ago, the state established the pCard program as a way to simplify, put all smaller purchases on a card instead of writing up purchase orders for every little thing.

“We save time in the way that things are purchased,” explained Sarah Allen, administrator of the State Procurement Office. “We only have to pay one vendor instead of multiple.”

But in 2010, the state auditor put out a report that was part crystal ball in light of recent pCard scandals on the Big Island and Maui.

“I think more oversight from State Procurement Office is what we recommended in the first part,” said state auditor Jan Yamane. “I think that would still be in order. I think that recommendation stands.”

So do six other auditor recommendations that never resulted in any changes.

“We spend all this money on all these audits and reports, and we don’t do a good enough job of following through,” said Sen. Donna Mercado Kim, D-Kapalama, Alewa, Kalihi Valley, Ft. Shafter, Moanalua Gardens and Valley.

Oversight is still the major weakness from that audit that stands out today.

“I think it still remains a risk area,” Yamane said. “Anytime you have someone with the ease of purchasing with a pCard, the potential exists for some type of abuse.”

But the State Procurement Office administrator says they can only dedicate about a half of one person’s job to pCard oversight.

The rest of the day-to-day work ends up delegated to 21 people in every state department plus all the counties who are designated “chief procurement officers” but each of them also has other jobs to do.

“We can’t ensure anything,” Allen said. “If somebody wants to do something wrong, they’ll find a way. But if we had more resources to do more thorough reviews, we certainly would be able to stem that I think.”

Since another state budget has gone by without funds to bolster the office, the head of procurement suggests dedicating some fraction of the $1 million a year in rebates the pCard vendor gives back.

“We would be able to enlarge our office in regards to procurement, create better training and maybe even start to do some real auditing, or I should say reviews, because we don’t have audit responsibilities.”

Until then, there exists a vast difference in pCard oversight, some tight, some loose to a fault.

“The question that we have watching what’s going on around us is, why aren’t some of these things blocked?” Yamane said. “Someone must have removed the controls or not put the controls in place in the first place.”

We’ve found some other interesting things in the course of our reviews. Total credit card spending at the University of Hawaii is about $25 million a year across 1,275 cardholders. The top 30 people spend between $100,000 and $200,000 each.

The UH Cancer Center alone holds five of those six-figure-spending spots, usually on lab supplies.

“If you have two or three or four people buying the same thing, what kind of stock do we have?” Kim said. “Are they working with each other? Is it sitting on the shelf? What’s the shelf life on them and who is paying attention to those things? It seems like a small little thing but it really adds up.”

The Honolulu Board of Water Supply charges $2.5 million a year on the cards, including more than $16,000 just on boots.

These may all be for legitimate government purposes, but questions remain about oversight for the program, including where all the stuff goes. By law, all state and county agencies are supposed to file inventories with the State Procurement Office.

Always Investigating asked who is current and for those missing, how far back? Are we getting the best prices on things when we buy this way?

“That’s a little hard to say,” Yamane said. “You’re supposed to get three quotes before you buy anything.”

“We can certainly spend a lot more time and effort looking at how we procure and how we can be more efficient,” Allen said. “We certainly could save a lot more that way.”

Huge investigations into pCards show it pays to pay attention. A nine-year federal audit found that nearly half of government credit card purchases were improper, fraudulent and abusive.

“It is a culturally systemic problem, it sounds like,” Allen said. “You have to have leaders that are ethical and show procurement integrity. I think it’s beyond processes or policy. It’s really about building a culture of ethical leadership.”